LACAN AND MEANING
SEXUATION, DISCOURSE THEORY, AND TOPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF HERMENEUTICS
CHAPTER 3
LACAN ON MEANING
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construction of numerous theories which, at least initially, he was all too willing to explain to his patients. Armed with this academic knowledge, he accordingly assumed the place of agency in the University discourse (Ud). But such a move only ever maintains the patient in his hysterical setup, for what it produces is $. Hysteria is a refusal of meaning based on metonymy. Expressed in mathemes, the subject $ qua hysteric stands in metonymic relation to the meaning-effects of S2, the chain of signifiers: 
Yet this is an imaginary solution. A refusal of meaning, however consistently undertaken, is still a meaningful project for the subject. Addressing the subject’s demands in academic fashion thus satisfies a request for meaning. But to provide this meaning is to offer temporary relief at best. It never fully patches over the subject’s underlying desire and ultimately only results in antagonizing the subject’s constitutive lack. Psychoanalysis is to instead suspend the hysteric’s subjectivized stance. Once Freud understood this, his interpretations were no longer limited to an ever shifting desire but attended instead to that around which desire circles. This amounts to listening to the underlying cause of subjectivization, the objet a in the place of truth in the Hd. What results is a shift in discourse, from the Ud to the Ad, which Lacan himself accomplishes in the 1960s. Once positioned as the object-cause of the subject’s desire, the analyst can stop the interminable slide of meaning which covers over the lack constitutive of subjectivity.
equated. While certainly confusing or even discouraging to the neophyte, this variability, combined with the fixedness of a quasi-mathematics, is one of the reasons Lacanian theory continues to be fruitfully developed in unexpected directions.
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